For a long, long time I was a big fan of the sport of baseball in general, and certain baseball teams in particular.
One of my fondest memories was as an older kid - I'd have been about 12 - loafing around the big old house in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn during long summer afternoons. My mother would be on "her porch", the shady-side former sleeping porch (that would have been a must-have in muggy pre-airconditioning Illinois summers for a house built in 1905), knitting and listening to the Cubs game on the radio.
"The Cubs will shine in '69" she'd say, mimicking the club slogan that season.
They didn't, of course, that being the now-famous Miracle Mets year. But, still...
That, and my parents' backgrounds growing up in the Thirties and Forties, when baseball was THE professional sport, was enough to get me started as a baseball fan.
My affection transferred to the great Philadelphia Phillies teams when we moved to southwestern Pennsylvania in the summer of 1974, and stayed with the club through the Eighties while I gypsied around the Army.
When I moved out to Portland in the summer of 1990 I found no major league club. The Portland baseball team was, instead, a high-minor (AAA) team then run by the Minnesota Twins organization. The Portland Beavers were a Pacific Coast League leftover that had been a regular when the PCL was the "western major league" but since the MLB expansion to the Left Coast had been in and out - mostly out - since the 1970s.
But baseball is baseball, so I started going to the old Civic Stadium to root, root, root for the Bevos.
I was about the only one.
The photo above is from the early Oughts - the field was sponsored by Portland General Electric at that point (between 2001 and about 2010) and called "PGE Park" - but whether it was the Nineties or the Oughts, whether you called in The Civic, PGE, Jeld-Wen Field, or Providence Park (which it is now) the "crowds" were the same:
Weren't.
I'm not sure why, exactly.
Portland has always had a pretty vocal contingent of baseball wanna-haves, including several of the bigger sportswriting names (some joker named Dwight Jaynes was always kinda insane on that issue), who agitate for throwing taxpayer dollars at getting a new baseball park and a team.
But when we HAD an actual team?
Nobody came to see 'em.
I mean...look at the picture. There's probably more people on the field than around it. And that was how it was, consistently, after the Twins-owned Beavers were stolen in 1993. Didn't matter; Single A Rockies (a Colorado farm) or AAA Beavers (a San Diego farm)...the public didn't turn out in droves.
It wasn't that the clubs were awful. The early Nineties Beavs were a hell of a club, with several players who had decent careers in the Show, and even the ones who didn't were a lot of fun. My personal favorite was an Dominican outfielder named Bernardo Brito Perez who usually went by just Brito.
He was the real-life version of the "Crash" Davis character in Bull Durham or the Serrano character in Major League; a minor league slugger who never had quite enough of the right stuff to make the jump up to the bigs.
In Brito's case it was the Deuce.
He managed to win a couple of PCL home run titles by sheer power, but in the two seasons I saw him in Portland it was the same deal. Every spring he'd come out blasting. AAA pitchers are like all pitchers everywhere; they come up through the minors with a big fastball and they like throwing fastballs. So they'd see this big lug and figure, "I'll just give this joker my heat".
And Brito'd park the heat in the deep right field seats.
So the next time the pitcher saw El Pupo they'd listen to their coach. Brito wouldn't see anything but curveball, curveball, slider, changeup.
Brito couldn't fucking hit the curve to save his life.
So by the end of the season he'd be picking off mistakes and hangers, and looking more frustrated by the game. He never did figure out how to hit the deuce, and so he never got more than a cup of coffee in the Show, and was retired by the mid-Nineties.
But when he was going good? He was, like a lot of the other Beavs, a lot of fun.
But the fans never came.
Finally the old Civic got a full-on soccer pitch makeover and the baseball club was out in the cold; the new owner sold them and they ended up in El Paso as the Chihuahuas and no, I'm not kidding.
For one thing, the dimensions were freakish because of the long-versus short-axes were utterly skewed by the construction as a mostly-football-field.
The Civic was unusual in that the mound-to-plate went southeast-to-northwest instead of the northeast direction recommended by the league. That was because of the location of the seats; at the north and west sides. The south end was an empty lot between the outfield fence and the huge brick north facade of the property owner, the Multnomah Athletic Club.
The east side might have been the weirdest of all, an immense (like, two-story high) vertical wall. Although the dimensions were supposed to be pretty close - about 320 feet down both the left and right-field foul lines - the Green Monster left-field wall made the left field feel like a short porch, and I think it got a lot of visitors to go with a more left-handed lineup than they would have otherwise.
Dead center? Death Fucking Valley. I don't think I ever saw anyone put one out over the deep centerfield wall.
Oh, and since we're talking about the old barn...one of the other weird things about it was the wall signs on that big left field wall.
I mean...prime real estate for ads, right?
One of the most iconic was a Jantzen swimwear "diving girl". You can barely see her arching her way down the wall in this 1982 shot from the high east side seats:
You gotta blow this shot up a LOT, and here's a detail from a shot in a collection of photos from the early Oughts that shows her a little better:
If you walked down to the front row of bleachers and looked down you'd notice that the pool of rainwater that accumulated in the small of her back and the crack of her ass was typically a nice verdant Pacific Northwest algae-green.
The groundskeepers obviously didn't get paid enough to scrub her butt for her.
Interestingly, when the soccer makeover in the Teens destroyed the old left field wall the diving girl was rescued and moved over to an interior wall above the west concourse...
...where she flies today, still caught in mid-dive.
Oh, and since we're talking about the Jantzen Girl...her companion over on the wall was this guy; the Henry Weinhard's "Gooooo Beavers" guy:
My recollection is that this ad was a pre-digital-era live-action thing, too. The Henry's guy folded up into a "sitting" position when nothing was happening (which, I'm sure you're shocked to know, isn't all that unusual in baseball...) but when a rally was going on or somebody parked one could be pulled up to raise his go-Beavers sign.
The whole thing is kinda sad, too, in that it's a reminder of the sort of brewer's nightmare that the US was for half a century.
Henry Weinhard was a real guy, a German immigrant who brewed your basic lager here in Portland from the 1850s until after the national brand invasions in the 1950s to 1970s.
It was still a decent commercial lager brewed at the old stand in the Pearl downtown until the Stroh's combine bought it, peddled it to the Miller conglomerate, who shut down the old brewhouse.
It took over a century, but the Schludwiller people finally won.
All of this is kind of just a stroll down Portland baseball-memory-lane...but I DO have a point in all of this.
Specifically, I'm reading that this season MLB is going to have a "pitch clock". From the linked article:
"Baseball hopes to reverse that trend this year, with a 15-second clock
for each pitch when the bases are empty, and 20 seconds with runners on
base. In addition, batters will be limited to one timeout per at-bat,
and there will also be a 30-second timer between hitters. (The sport is making other changes,
including banning the defensive infield shift to generate more offense,
and making bases slightly larger to increase safety and possibly
jumpstart stolen base attempts. All the new rules will be in effect for
spring traininggames, which begin February 24 ahead of the 2023 season
Opening Day on March 30.)"
Now. I'm older than dirt. If ever there should be a person who shouts at the baseball clouds that this "clock" is rank obscenity and a defilement of the Sacred Game it should be me. But y'know what?
Fuck that.
I can't watch pro baseball anymore because it's So. Fucking. Goddamn Slow.
Pitchers fucking around endlessly. Batters stepping out after every pitch. The tyranny of the home run.
I was too young to really know the baseball of the early Sixties, before the lower mound rule of 1968, but I was told by fans my father's age that it was the deadliest, boringest, slowest, most excruciating baseball they'd ever seen; two teams both dominated by power pitchers playing games decided by whose heater got up in the other teams' sluggers wheelhouse.
Ugh.
I still enjoy watching baseball in person (and thanks, Pop, for teaching me how to score...) but on television?
My life's not long enough for that shit.
Mind you, there's still people who ARE bitching:
"For more than 150 years, the lack of a clock on the field has
distinguished baseball from other major US team sports, and some
baseball purists are sure to object to adding one. “There’s no clock in
baseball. And there’s no clock in baseball for a reason,” now-New York
Mets star pitcher Max Scherzer said in 2019."
Yeah, well, good luck with that if you WANT your sport to go the way of American jazz; become the fading property of the Old and the White. There's a reason so many good young athletes (especially Black) don't play baseball anymore; it's boring as fuck.
I wish I could find it online, but Bill James wrote a good piece on long boring games when the trend towards long boring games started to be noticeable back in the Eighties (or Nineties).
His main point was that for all people like Scherzer's bullshit about how "there's no clock in baseball" there WAS a clock in baseball and had been since the pro game emerged in the 19th Century.
It was the sun.
Ballgames (except on Saturday, and Saturday games back in the day were often doubleheaders...) had to start in late afternoon (because the fans needed to be off work) so the game had to be wrapped up before sundown.
Umpires in the day had one other job; to hustle the game along to make that happen.
James' contention was that the first generation of night-game umpires and players had grown up in the sport with that, so the tradition of hustling the game along continued until that generation aged out some time in the late Sixties or Seventies.
The thing is, dicking around is in the interests of both the pitcher - especially with runners on, who has to pitch out of the stretch AND check the runners - and the batter, who wants to throw off the pitcher's timing and work the count.
It's NOT in the interests of the fans, who would rather not watch the pitcher thrown down to first half a dozen times in an at-bat or watch the batter step out to scratch his nuts.
So.
As an old Portland baseball fan?
Go, go gadget clock!
And if the new rules work? Would I go to baseball games again?
Sure!
Just don't ask me for my tax dollars to build a new stadium, though. Fuck that, too.
Six years ago I wrote about a trip to North Portland's mall and the classic carousel therein.
The carousel was an oddity, a remnant of the pre-WW2 era when the island in the Columbia was an old-school amusement park instead of a Seventies style shopping mall;
"The carousel remains, last of the amusement rides, remnant of the old mall, a whirling delight of grandiloquent carved horses and antique showmanship of an earlier time."
Well, not any more.
The last bits of the Seventies mall were demolished a couple of years back. The new owners have converted the site into a 21st Century big-box retail outlet for a couple of the remaining tenants such as Burlington. But the carousel disappeared during the renovation and for a while even the location where the pieces were stored could not be found.
A bit of classic Portland panic ensued until eventually a City councilman got involved and chivvied the hiding place out of the out-of-state owner.
(The little article about this adventure at the Restore Oregon website is kind of adorable, complete with a treasure map to the storage building and Nick "Indiana" Fish in adventurer garb...)
But, as the linked article notes, the carousel is still in pieces and the owners show little or no urgency in building a new home for it. Were my kiddos still carousel fans I would be more harassed about that, but as it is it's simply a rather sad little note, the passing of another piece of rather pleasant Portland history.
The Hooters across the freeway, on the other hand, is still going strong serving up dry oversalted chicken wings and domestic corn beer to gullible rubes overly impressed by tits.
I had a bit of a slow afternoon yesterday, so I clocked out early and joined my family at our little Oaks Park.
I suspect that most cities of any size and age have at least one of these old carnivals, leftovers from the turn of the last century when "entertainment" was something you had to leave the house to find.
This particular one opened in 1905 as "The Oaks" - you can see why in the picture to the left. The oak trees that forested the river island bar still stand over the little park.
The story is that The Oaks had a serious rivalry with the "other" entertainment game in town in 1905 - the Lewis and Clark Exposition rising in what had been the swamps of northwest Portland. According to the Portland History website I linked to above "The Oaks" won, opening a couple of days before the Exposition.
I have a real affection for these old amusement parks. I spent a good portion of my childhood several miles away from something called Lenape Park, a similar old carny as close to the Brandywine Creek as The Oaks was to the Willamette River. The late Victorian carousel and the ginormous wooden roller coaster seemed gothic and exciting to me, child of the pre-electronic age that I was, and my love for the turn-of-the-century parks has stuck with me to this day. So I appreciate the lingering small-town, slow paced feel of Oaks Park for the ghost of the past that it is.
My kids, however, could care less.
They like Oaks Park because they like the bumper cars, and the carousel, and the kiddie rides (yes, even the Boy, who is really too old for the tiny rides his little sister enjoys). We spent the better part of three hours there yesterday riding the rides, eating hot dogs and curly fries, and dodging the showers that scudded past like unhappy memories.
The Boy measured himself against the go-kart scale again. He's so close. He said that he thought his next growth spurt would put him over the bar, and so he's even thinking about eating a vegetable if that will help.
I doubt it'll happen, but you never know; he REALLY wants to drive those go-karts.
They both loved them some bumper cars. I honestly don't recall how many times they rode them, but it was a lot.
Little Miss even conned me into riding; she wanted to drive and her brother, in the way of big brothers everywhere, wouldn't give up the wheel. She needed a co-driver, though, because her little legs couldn't reach the pedal. So I pushed and she steered and the whole macguffin was vastly entertaining. There's something truly primeval about the instincts aroused by bumper cars. When the lights come on and the sparks start to fly from the tin flag at the top of the long pole even the gentlest heart is gripped with an overwhelming urge to ram and destroy. Something about seeing the gleeful expression on your little daughter's face as she accelerates and slams some stranger backwards into the wall makes even the most doting daddy skeptical about the whole "sugar and spice" thing.
So we whiled away the afternoon at the silliest of diversions; going fast and spinning around,
getting outside of junky food,
(during which we found that curly fries make great tusks, by the way...)
racing from one ride to another,
and generally disporting ourselves in a completely socially-insignificant fashion.
Finally, even the unsophisticated joys of Oaks Park wore thin. The skies grew grayer and colder, the rain began to spatter down with a more serious intent, and the crowd, what little there had been, thinned to the point of dereliction. The three of us felt that we'd dragged the most worth we could out of the old park. We trooped out to the little Honda and piled inside, ready to follow Mommy (who, no fool she, had taken the opportunity to dump Daddy with the kiddos and abscond hours earlier) back to North Portland.
Behind us the gaudy lights and carny noises faded into the spatter of rain. But climbing the hill away from the old oak grove I could still see the cotton-candy glow against the darkening sky, like the faint corona of a carnival crowd a hundred years ago looking then for the same foolish pleasures we had just found and left behind us.
The coolness, what there is, comes from the metal curb covers, artifacts of the horse-drawn wagon days when a sensible municipality provided some protection from the hard wear of the metal wagon-wheel rims at the most likely place for those rims to run up over the softer concrete curbs.
But in these gentler days the need for protection from steel wheels is much less than the need for people who can't walk to get up and down from the sidewalk to cross the street. Hence the gradual replacement of the old steel-rim corners with ADA-standard ramp corners.
The City of Portland has been working its way northwest over the past several months, and just last week we saw the first indication that our old corners are not long for this world.
My kiddos, slaves to the wheel that they are, are very excited about this change for the ease it will provide for cycling and scootering.
I'm resigned but still a trifle saddened. I understand why the change is a good idea but will miss the steel guards, a piece of the physical reality that was Portland in the Teens and 1920's, a steel-and-concrete artifact that have seen almost a century of the people and their passage that make up the city I love.
